When power mongers regroup: Inside the ADC circus

WHAT was widely touted as a potential seismic shift in Nigeria’s political terrain turned out to be a mere political puff off smoke.  For weeks, a band of aggrieved and wandering politicians had been climbing every available rooftop, megaphone in hand, vowing to dethrone President Bola Tinubu come 2027. Not because the man is doing a terrible job on the saddle. Not because the economy has worsened or security has completely collapsed. No. Just because they missed out on the appurtenances of power and cannot seem to function without the title “Your Excellency.” Two years into his presidency, Bola Tinubu is tackling Nigeria’s multi-headed problems like a man cutting down a mountainous terrain with a pickaxe, painfully slow, yes, but certainly purposeful. Yet, the self-styled redeemers, who gathered under the banner of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) in Abuja on Wednesday, chief among them Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi, have not proposed a single fresh idea. Their only strategy appears to be crying louder than the bereaved, recycling worn-out clichés, and weaponising poverty they themselves helped fertilise over the past 25 years. This is not a political rebirth. It is more like a poorly-scripted sequel that is ill-fated. These opposition actors, having deflated their original parties and lost the plot as credible voices, are merely using the ADC as a special purpose vehicle for power-hunting. It is a political Uber for those stranded without relevance.

Nigerians have seen this movie before. In 2018, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, after penning a series of acidic letters to President Muhammadu Buhari, rallied his own coalition of the wounded under the same ADC flag. That effort collapsed faster than a soufflé in a thunderstorm. If history is any guide, the new ADC revival is another expedition in political self-harm. The truth is the ADC gathering is never a policy-driven renaissance. It is more like a reunion of political exes with bruised egos. Jealousy, personal bitterness, inflated ambition, and expired influence are the glue binding this coalition. They are not out to rescue anyone; they only want to rescue themselves from political oblivion. To further understand the theatrical quality of this attempted comeback, let us meet the cast. Atiku Abubakar: A walking case study in political promiscuity. He has changed parties more times than a chameleon in a rainbow factory. Six failed presidential bids in 30 years, and he is still convinced he has a divine appointment with Aso Rock. By 2027, Atiku will be 80 years old. One wonders if he sees the ADC as a retirement plan or a midlife crisis project stretched into old age. Peter Obi: Running on the altar of religion and ethnicity, our fault lines, he came third in the 2023 presidential  election. From every pulpit to podcast, he hammers out statistics like a broken calculator stuck on pessimism. The same man who vilified the “structure of criminality” has now joined forces with it, convinced that recycled alliances will take him to the Promised Land. For a man who loves to chant “competence, capacity, and compassion,” his own time as governor left more questions than legacy projects.

Senator David Mark: The new “Protem Chairman” of ADC is our new-found democrat who wants to save our hard-won civil rule. How democratic! He spent 20 years in the Senate, out of which he spent 8 years as Senate President. He left Otukpo, his hometown, looking like it missed every development memo sent since the 1980s. A man with this track record should not be talking about saving democracy. He helped bury it once. Nasir el-Rufai: The former governor of Kaduna suffers from the well-documented “short man syndrome” and an even shorter loyalty span. Denied a ministerial position, he is now leading a political tantrum. Both former Presidents Buhari and Obasanjo reportedly said El-Rufai can not be trusted with a vending machine, let alone national leadership. Despite his knack for media drama, his electoral influence is skeletally thin he would struggle to win a ward in Kaduna today.

Rotimi Amaechi: Spoilt silly by the system. He is the dictionary definition of entitlement. From being the Speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly to being governor to minister, without ever holding a real life job like an average Nigerian, he thinks Nigeria owes him a crown and garlands. Despite being Director-General of Buhari’s campaigns in 2015 and 2019, he failed spectacularly to deliver Rivers State to APC in three elections. Each time, he got beaten by Nyesom Wike with a stick, a smile, and a landslide. Amaechi is a synonym for failure in matters of elections. Rauf Aregbesola: As governor of Osun, he engaged in bizarre governance experiments that left the state more broke than Greece in 2008 and left civil servants unpaid. As Minister of Interior, his biggest achievements were announcing public holidays and turning passport collection into an Olympic sport. He once swore President Tinubu was second only to God in his life. Now, he wants to save Nigeria with Atiku in a gang up against the man God used to elevate him to positions of national prominence.  Bolaji Abdullahi: He is the master of fine talk and zero conviction. One moment, he is with the PDP. Next, he is with the APC, then back to the PDP. Now, he is the mouthpiece of ADC. When Arise TV’s Rufai Oseni asked if he was keeping Saraki’s seat warm, it was not a dig but a clinical diagnosis.

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To be clear, this ADC crowd is not on a mission to reinvent Nigeria. They are merely trying to reinvent themselves. No ideology, no credible blueprint, just a collection of power retirees seeking roles and relevance like actors auditioning for a remake of a show nobody watched the first time. And as if their credibility deficit was not enough, their leadership structure itself is illegal. According to the 2022 Electoral Act, any appointment of party officials must be done through a properly convened party convention or National Executive Council meeting, supervised by INEC. What happened in Abuja was not a lawful convention or NEC meeting of ADC. It was a political comedy skit without a script. In the end, the so-called coalition is nothing but a choir of has-beens and never-weres singing off-key. They lack the fire, the discipline, the ideological clarity and the mass movement element that propelled APC to power in 2015. Rather than waste everyone’s time parading tired slogans, the ADC gang should just say what they really mean: “We want power because we miss the perks.”

Unfortunately for them, Nigeria has changed. And Nigerians are watching and will laugh out loud at the appropriate  time.

•Ajayi is Senior Special Assistant to President Bola Tinubu on Media and Publicity